Semiconductor integrated circuit dice are ubiquitous in many contemporary consumer products. As semiconductor dice get smaller and more complex, problems associated with making electrical connections between semiconductor dice and printed circuit boards or intermediate substrates such as multichip modules have been addressed with a variety of constantly evolving solutions.
Flip-chip technologies using solder balls or bumps have helped to alleviate some of these problems. For example, instead of wire bonding, balls of solder may be formed at the locations of the bond pads of a semiconductor die. The semiconductor die is flipped upside down so the solder balls are placed on the contact pads of a carrier substrate. A solder reflow process heats the solder balls until the solder begins to flow and bond with a corresponding contact pad of a carrier substrate.
Another prior art packaging implementation provides for mounting a variety of integrated circuit dice on a substrate. In this implementation, a plurality of known good dice are mounted within cavities formed in the substrate. Redistribution and interconnect layers are formed terminating in electrical connections such as conductive bumps or balls. The substrate cavities receive signal device connections, such as conductive bumps, of a plurality of semiconductor dice in a flip-chip configuration. A portion of the substrate's back surface is then removed to a depth sufficient to expose the conductive bumps. In a related prior art solution, the cavities receive the semiconductor dice with their active surfaces facing up and metal layer connections are formed and connected to bond pads or other electrical connectors of the semiconductor dice.
However, in light of contemporary semiconductor device packages, there is a continued need for a reliable and cost effective solution for mounting integrated circuit dice into a single package. All solutions disclosed to date either require expensive and time-consuming fabrication steps to fabricate bumps or balls or demand an extraordinarily high-level of placement precision of the dice within a substrate. Therefore, what is needed is an economical, efficient, and reliable method to mount and interconnect singulated dice onto a substrate.